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A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.

Key Accusations and Particulars

Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.

They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.

Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.

Further Claims

Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and deceptions.

“As paradoxical as it may seem, she actually feels relief, believing this is an opportunity to reveal the truth of the events with transparency and to definitively put an end to all forms of speculation, misunderstanding and controversy,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Related Incidents

The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.

The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.